August 5, 2025

AUTHENTIC CONNECTIONS:
The New Professional Advantage

How do we suddenly grow these all-important human skills when we just spent the last couple of decades undoing them during the mobile era? ​ From today’s teacher, ​ANNIE HEDGPETH​

In an AI-dominated market, the skills that make us uniquely human are becoming the most valuable for us to build. Being able to connect, develop trust, and influence other people rank among the most important of those skills.

But how do we suddenly grow these all-important human skills when we just spent the last couple of decades undoing them during the mobile era? After all, we even outsourced our professional networking to social media:

• Why go out to coffee with the new hire when I can just connect with them on LinkedIn?
• No need to actually talk to my director when I can just like and comment on her tweets.
• My team is super-close. We’re all Facebook friends.

We believe the research about loneliness and disconnection, but we haven't fixed it because it should be simple, but it's not.

AI has changed everything. Even our social media is filled with AI-generated content. Our human skills are suddenly valuable once again, and isn’t that pretty wonderful?

Work backward from your goals

Start with your professional goals in mind, your long term 5-year goals all the way down to your short term quarterly milestones.

Do you want to change your career? Get a promotion? Buy a house? Focus on your family while remaining steady at your job?

Action Item

• Write down your goals and create a plan for how to achieve them.

Identify who’s going to help you get there

Once you know where you’re going, you will have a better idea of who can help you get there. You may be tempted to think that you only need mentor-type people in front of you, leading you along your journey in order to meet your goals. The truth is, however, that we really need meaningful connections from a well-rounded network to achieve our goals, some people in front, some behind, some side-by-side, some cheering from the sidelines.

Action Items

• Make a list of no more than 10-20 people who will comprise your balanced professional network. Consider questions like:
  • How do you want to grow professionally? By leading others? By being stretched by someone you admire? Both?
  • What do you need support with and who can give you that support?
  • Who are you a professional fan of, and who are professional fans of you?
• Brainstorm ways that you can be a support to each of them, no matter how small.

Start with small, intentional connections

If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of nurturing connections with 10-20 people, don’t be! Simply consider ways that you can be intentional with each person in the smallest way in real life.

Once you implement that intentionality, you can learn how to support your network and understand what you can gain from their wisdom.

Action Item

• Make a list of the learning experiences that you need in order to accomplish your goals.
• Begin to meaningfully connect with your network and determine who can help you with these learning goals, and how you can help them with theirs.

Start now!

You want your connections to be authentic, so start nurturing them now, not when you need something. And you can start small! Just get something on the calendar and go from there.

This will unlock such beautiful opportunities to regain the skill of creating human connections. It will give you a definite edge when it comes to the people side of your job. It will take time, effort, and intentionality, but it’s so worth it.

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